Posted
by
kdawsonon Tuesday August 03, 2010 @04:02PM
from the rim-shot dept.

adeelarshad82 writes "Research in Motion announced the company's first slider-style BlackBerry, the Torch 9800, which is also the first BlackBerry with both a touch screen and hard keyboard, and the first device to run the new OS 6. The Torch feels and looks very much like a BlackBerry, with the proper BlackBerry Bold-style arrangements of plastic, metal, and glass; there are also BlackBerry fonts on the keys and the now-standard BlackBerry trackpad. The Torch's 3.2-inch, 360-by-480 screen is a standard capacitive LCD touch screen. The screen is bright and sharp, but it's obviously behind the competition in terms of resolution. The Torch has a 5-megapixel camera with VGA video recording, Bluetooth 2.1, 512 MB of program memory, 4 GB of built-in storage, and 802.11n Wi-Fi. The Torch has the same 624-MHz Marvell processor as the existing BlackBerry Bold. The new BlackBerry 6 OS adds touch to the interface mix. RIM appears to have totally rewritten its media apps. There's a new Desktop Manager coming with BlackBerry 6, and a Social Feeds app that combines Twitter, Facebook, and various instant messaging conversations."

No kidding. Have you ever tried developing for the BlackBerry browser, or the Widget API, which uses the same rendering engine? Netscape 4 is literally more capable and standards-compliant by comparison. It's virtually unusable to do anything beyond bare basics with JavaScript or CSS (and even then, behavior is often inconsistent and unreliable).

The Widget API is also perplexing in its own right. Although it supposedly uses the same rendering engine, its implementation of the DOM is slightly different from the Browser's. In short: a nightmare.

We have had opposite experience. We do provide work iPhones and support them. iPhone users we never hear from again about Email. Blackberries on other hand are constantly loosing connection to BES, BES looses connection to mailbox, reset their BES account, clean out their Blackberry queue, it's never ending ticket queue.

Between most sysadmins I know, their dislike of BES is pretty universal and we wish they would embrace ActiveSync like everyone else.